The more you spend the more you loved the deceased, right?

Like Jessica Mitford's “American Way of Death,” “Final Rights” deals with the industry that has evolved around our culture's reluctance to face the immutable fact of our deaths and what to do with “the remains.”

Written by the current and former executive directors of Funeral Consumers Alliance national office, “Final Rights” details in frequently polemic style methods of the funeral industry to increase profit. The authors delve into personal experiences with deaths of family and friends, reports and complaints to the nonprofit FCA and the Funeral Ethics Organization, and publications of the funeral industry itself to support their arguments. “We are questioning the validity of the most basic assumptions that underpin the contemporary funeral business: the notion that money spent equals love shown, the idea that funeral directors are so indispensable that no family can cope with death without their expertise.... We cannot make progress in protecting grieving people from manipulation without confronting them candidly.”

And candid they are, sometimes so graphically that the reader may be tempted to look away as if passing a particularly gruesome car wreck. To dispel the widely believed myths that embalming prevents or at least delays decay of a dead body, the authors contend that “nothing that happens to our bodies after death is ‘pretty' ... Decay of the body ... can range from going back to the earth in a compost-like fashion to a situation in which the body putrefies and turns to a smelly liquid.” No doubt a grieving family does not need to be confronted with such a vivid description. Neither should they be influenced to buy embalming by misinformation the funeral director could correct, were profit not involved.

The authors report many examples of funeral directors misinforming survivors that embalming is required by law and is necessary to prevent disease, despite the Federal Trade Commission specifically citing these practices as deceptive. Calling the FTC “a fickle consumer ally,” the authors scathingly condemn the agency's lack of enforcement of the Funeral Rule, since 1986 the only federal regulation dealing with funeral consumers' rights.

One of the provisions of the Funeral Rule requires a General Price List itemizing services and prices be given to anyone requesting it. The authors find particularly egregious the industry's practice of charging a basic services fee, defined by providers in various ways that circumvent the purpose of the list — comparison shopping. For example, one provider may include overhead and taxes in the fee while another may include use of facilities. The nondeclinable, basic services fee, according to the authors, mushroomed by 73 percent from 1982 to 1988 and is now the single most expensive item at most mortuaries.

State-by-state chapters on laws regulating what happens after death outline what consumers need to know to deal with the funeral industry or, if they choose, how to legally manage their own services.